SEO | Basics of SEO

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the process by which you attract more visitors to your website. A well-organized website is critical to getting traffic, but a website alone is not enough. Developing a well-visited site requires external links from authoritative sources like Facebook and Google Places.

Your Floranext site has built-in search engine optimization. When your site is created, it automatically has search engine keywords, meta tags, and title tags set. However, you can change all of these in your Floranext dashboard by going to Settings > Website Settings > SEO.

External Links to Your Site

Many don't realize how important links are to the way their website is ranked by Google and other search engines. In fact, the single most important component of Google's search ranking is the number and quality of incoming links to your website.

Incoming Links: Links from sources like Mapquest, Yahoo Local, and Yelp! are signals to search engines that your business is worth paying attention to. Many sites like the ones just mentioned allowing you to post free links back to your site. Make sure your business is listed in as many free directories as possible. 

Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites are increasingly important for search engines. It's not enough to simply have accounts on these sites, however—you need to have activity and followers. Your number of followers and "likes" is a good indicator for search engines of your website's importance.

A Well-Organized Website

A good website is critical to getting attention from search engines. 

• Unique page names: This is the name of the page on the top of your browser. Every page should be different.
• Unique, descriptive URLs: Your website URLs should look like flowershop.com/dozen-roses, not flowershop.com/123456
• Keywords: Keywords built into every page of your website should be unique, descriptive search engine keywords
• Cross-link sites: If you have multiple websites, put links to all of them in the footer of your websites.
• Sitemap: A listing of all the pages on your site in XML format

Search Engine Tags

Title Tag

This is the page name that shows up on search results. In your Floranext site, this is automatically generated—on the home page, this is your Store Info tab under Search Engine Title. The home page will show up as Search Engine Title For product pages, they will appear in the format Product Name | Search Engine Title.

Search Engine Description

This is the description that appears under the title tag on search engine results. 

Search Engine Keywords

Keywords don't show to the users or on search engine results. These are for search engine "spiders" that read your website to help with categorization. Most SEO experts agree this information is less important these days and that the content on your website that is visible to users is more important.

H1 & H2

The header tags help search engines understand what your website is about.